Furby Boom and Duracell Giveaway!! Power a Smile!!

I am so excited to share this giveaway with my readers, and especially at this time of year!

Our family had always bought the cheap dollar store batteries, because I thought it was better to pay less...what I have learned though is that I was actually paying more then I thought, because we were going through batteries like crazy in this house.

Duracell has become a regular name in our house now.  They last longer and I don't have to buy batteries as often anymore.

One Christmas, when my son was about 5 or 6, we had him write out his list for Santa.  On the top of the list, believe it or not, was batteries!! It was the cheapest Christmas gift ever asked for!  That is because we used to have a rule that when the batteries died the toy was done...he knew that if he had his own stash of batteries, he would be able to play with his toys longer;-)  (I am THAT mom!!)

In reality, we always replaced the batteries.  That year, we bought him a whole pile of batteries and he was so happy when he opened them in the morning...

These are the batteries that will be making an appearance this year in our house:

Introducing Duracell Quantum, the world’s most advanced alkaline battery. With its revolutionary Hi-Density Core™ and proprietary PowerCheck™ power indicator, Duracell Quantum has been engineered to deliver the performance consumers demand.
Duracell Quantum offers long-lasting power when it’s needed the most—whether its powering children’s toys or first responders’ radios, you can count on Duracell’s most powerful premium-tier battery when it just has to work.

Features and Benefits:
The Duracell Quantum Hi-Density Core stores more power boosters to provide longer lasting performance than ever before Duracell Quantum is the single solution for multiple device needs in a household working efficiently across high-drain and low-drain devices – from remote controls to portable video games Duracell is the only battery brand with PowerCheck on the cell for accurate reading of remaining power Duracell DURALOCK technology locks in power for up to 10 years in storage.

To make this even better, we are going to be trying them out first in a new Furby Boom!!  But don't tell my 11 year old!!  Her birthday is on December 22, and we are always struggling to figure out what to get for her birthday when Christmas is just a few days away...This is going to be her big surprise this year!!

A whole new generation of Furby critters is about to hatch, so dust off your Furbish dictionary and get ready to party with your Furby Boom creature! Your Furby has a mind of its own, and the way you treat your Furby will shape its personality -- so the more fun you have with it, the better! It speaks more English the more you play with it. Tickle your Furby, talk to it, and feed it with your finger. Play some tunes, pull some tails and party on with your Furby Boom creature!

You can also download a free app to have a Furby Boom adventure and translate Furbish. Take care of your Furby, get virtual eggs and hatch and raise the Furblings! The Furby app is optional and works with iPad, iPod touch and iPhone with iOS 5.0 or later (devices sold separately). The app is not compatible with prior Furby generations. Check Furby.com for device compatibility. Requires 4 "AA" batteries (not included).

Furby and all related characters are trademarks of Hasbro.
iPad, iPod touch and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

I am not sure if I am going to regret the whole "Furby" thing or not, but I do know that Grace has been wanting one for a very, very long time!!  I cannot wait to see her face when she opens this gift!!

I have a Furby Boom and Duracell Gift Pack to give away to one of my lucky readers!!
Estimated retail value is $80.

 a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: I am a P&Gmom/mamanP&G. As part of my affiliation with this group I receive products and special access to P&G events and opportunities. The opinions on this blog are my own.

It's Not Beginning to Feel Like Christmas...

5 days, yup, that is it. 

Happy Holidays?

All the status updates on Facebook lately seem to revolve around the "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays"...

A Christmas Like No Other

This Christmas we were looking forward to a lot of fun stuff.  We get to visit with family and friends, get to see the Christmas display in one of the local parks, go on a chickadee feeding walk and watch the movie Yogi Bear on Christmas day with the whole family.  Yes, we were going to bring Faith for the first time with us to the movie this year.  It was going to be a great Christmas.

Then life happened...I took an overnight shift, which put me home by 9:15 Christmas morning.  We had made arrangements with the kids and knew what the schedule would look like until I got home.  Everyone was excited and we were just starting to wrap our gifts around 9pm. 

          Faith talking to Rudolph on the phone at the local park.        

We had just returned home from the park and the nice, brisk (freezing) walk to see the lights.  We do this every Christmas eve.  This year, Faith was able to actually run around and enjoy looking at, and touching all the lights in the park.  She just had a blast, and it was wonderful to live the excitement of the season through another 3 year old:-)  This is the last time we will see that kind of wonder on one of our 3 year olds faces...

We came home and quickly found Santa on the NORAD Santa Tracker, read Twas The Night Before Christmas and put out the cookies, milk and reindeer food, and stockings for the night.  Then the kids were all shipped to bed.  Faith, of course, did not want to sleep upstairs with the girls, so we let her stay down with us.  She laid down on the chair and fell asleep while watching us wrap the gifts (also a tradition that we really NEED to change!!;-)

We were partway through the wrapping when we noticed that Faith was starting to have a seizure.  It was a small, focal seizure and there is not much we can do about it.  So, we made sure she was safe and we continued to wrap gifts.  I had to leave for my overnight shift around 10:30, so there wasn't much time for me to help. 

Then the seizure started to change.  It had been going on about 8 minutes and was turning into a grand mal, again.  So, we gave the ativan to Faith in hopes that it would stop.  It did.  After about 10 minutes of seizing she started to slow down and stopped for about 3 minutes.  Then it started again.  This time it lasted about 20 minutes and it was all grand mal, her head, arms, legs and face were all moving.  We called 911 around 10 minutes after the second one started and she had just stopped seizing about 1 minute before they arrived.  It was too long.  30 minutes of seizing is too long.  Faith was brought to the hospital and was admitted.  She had another 13 minute seizure at the hospital, and 2.5 mg of Ativan later, wasn't stopping, so they drilled a hold into her femur? bone?  I think it is called intraosseous access, after much googling later:-) 

This is the mark and the hole that the IO Access needle/drill left

Off daddy went to the hospital with Faith, while I coached the older 2 kids in how to get the house ready for the big morning that was coming up.  My amazing, wonderfully compassionate and caring teen and preteen came to the rescue.  They finished all the wrapping, they decorated the house, they made the breakfast and they ate the cookies and drank the milk, and wrote the note from Santa.  And they had a blast doing all that.  They were so proud this morning and had so much fun watching the girls opening gifts from "Santa"...I am still kind of speechless by this.  I have to say it again, my kids are absolutely awesome!!

I got home from work and called the hospital to see what the timeline was going to be for Faith to leave.  They said that she was still nodding off a lot and they wanted to make sure she was up to going home.  My parents had been at the house with the kids until I arrived, they enjoyed opening stockings and a few gifts before I arrived, they had breakfast (that Santa made;-) and they played with their new toys.  When I got there we continued opening up some more gifts, but made sure to save some for when daddy and Faith got home.

I got that phone call and off I went to pick them up.  Faith was in her usual "ativaned" state.  When she has over 1mg, she totally turns back into an infant.  She couldn't hold her body up, she was screaming and was just being mean and inconsolable.  It is never fun to see her like this...but, we brought her home, with 2 bags of gifts from the hospital, and we tried to normalize our Christmas for the other kids.  Faith was so overwhelmed with the activity and business, that she screamed and hit and cried regularly.  Because of the IO access procedure she had done, she could hardly put any weight on that one leg, so she was stumbling all over the room. 

I don't know what is harder, knowing that she had 3 significantly bad seizures, or watching her not able to walk or understand what is going on...

Anyhow, the older kids and daddy went out to the movie.  I stayed home with Faith.  She is finally sleeping, not sure for how long.  But I am going to finish up the supper while there is some peace here.  This is one of those Christmas' that we don't want to remember, but will probably be forever ingrained in us...

Merry Christmas to everyone, thanks for being a part of our lives.  Thanks for the prayers that we know we receive on a regular basis.  Thanks for all the amazing support that we are offered.  We are grateful for these things and they are better then any gift money can buy.  We couldn't get through this life without our friends and family, near and far:-)

The December Blahs...

I love Christmas, I always have...but December is that time when the sun starts to go down, if it shows up, and it can be dark and dreary.  Add to that the birthday of our daughter who was born to Heaven 10 years ago and it can become a real dark time of year.  Angels story is here

You would think that after 10 years it wouldn't hurt so much, and it doesn't hurt AS much as it did in the beginning, but I guess the unknowns of what life would have been like, and how our family would have been so different creep up every year at this time. 

I have noticed that I seem to have a hard time getting into the spirit of the season until after Angels birthday.  The past few years we have missed out on going to celebrate at her cemetery, because I think we are in a different season, but this year I am kinda feeling like we need this.  We need to acknowledge that little life again, with the whole family.  Not just for me, but for all of us and to bring us to that point where we can be thankful for and celebrate all our lives and circumstances.

If I had the opportunity to change our history and to "delete" this experience, I don't think I would.  I think that everything we go through in life, whether good or bad, helps to define who we are as people.  We may not have been able to touch so many lives when Faith was born, if we hadn't learned to mourn Angel. 

We wouldn't have been able to understand and be compassionate towards others going through difficult times, if we hadn't learned to go through the grieving process...

I wouldn't change any of it.  I know, without a doubt, that Angel is in Heaven, celebrating regularly and she has no pain and one day we will be there with her.  It really is comforting to know that. 

So, while it is the happiest time of the year, we still mourn and grieve the life that we never got to know...but we take pleasure in being reminded that this is the season of life and redemption...and that our mourning can become dancing!!

I really want to insert a picture here, but those pictures are still for my personal friends...

I tried to write a poem for this post...but right now I can't get past:

10 years have passed so quickly
Since we held you in our arms
A life so precious, oh so sweet

And I can't really get past that...

I guess that I want to say that the impact of Angel in our life has been mixed...we have felt confusion, love, faith, doubt, anger, support and now strength.  Without Angel a part of our life we would have never been able to handle the fight for Faith.  Without Angel in our life we would have never been able to mourn and comfort someone else going through a tough situation..

Without Angel...

Without Angel...

We would not be who we are today. 

Happy Birthday Angel, you will always be a part of our lives:-)

Visitor From Heaven - Twila Paris
A visitor from Heaven
If only for a while
A gift of love to be returned
We think of you and smile

A visitor from Heaven
Accompanied by grace
Reminding of a better love
And of a better place

With aching hearts and empty arms
We send you with a name
It hurts so much to let you go
But we're so glad you came
We're so glad you came

A visitor from Heaven
If only for a day
We thank Him for the time He gave
And now it's time to say
We trust you to the Father's love
And to His tender care
Held in the everlasting arms
And we're so glad you're there
We're so glad you're there

With breaking hearts and open hands
We send you with a name
It hurts so much to let you go
But we're so glad you came
We're so glad you came

Cutie Pies Holiday Reflections

Cutie Pies diary entries from the Christmas holidays...used with permission from Cutie Pie herself;-)

Dec 21 2009

Today I split my toe open. I got 2 stiches in my toe

Dec 22 2009

Today I split my head open I did not have to get stiches but I got specile purpple glue on my head

Dec 23 2009

My brother woke up puuking in our tolat

Dec 24th 2009

This morning my mom is puking in the toilet. Tomorrow is Christmas and I hope nothing happens.

Our holidays in a nutshell...as seen through the eyes of an 8 year old...

Year End Ponderings...

Well, the Christmas holidays have come and gone, quickly, I might add, and here I am thinking about this past year. Our successes, our failures, our happy times, our sad times. I think that altogether my/our year has been great.

This was a year of big steps for us. First year having a kid in high school, first year having a kid in Junior Kindergarten, first year for me to go back to school, a lot of firsts and big ones too!!

We have surpassed a lot of potential health issues. We have and are continuing to overcome many more health issues, in regards to Faith. We have, as a family, remained quite healthy (except for a few days over this past week).

We truly have been blessed beyond measure!!

I usually like to try to put together some Christmas/New Years (which ends up becoming a "Looking Forward" Spring update) to send to family and friends. I haven't managed to get around to that yet. I have been busy working and writing and learning and studying and mommy'ing'. I will get to that soon.

I am looking forward to this next year. I would really like to have some of a book written, at least started (past the first chapter), about Faith. I also would like to look into having the seizure book that I wrote, published and see if we can do something with it. There is nothing else out there like it right now. I also think, that when we see the outcome of the brain damage, there will be another book written, in a similar fashion, that we can share with people. I have learned that knowledge is power, in more ways then 1!!

With this writing bug going on in my head, I have been looking into some freelance writing opportunities. I am not sure how to navigate the scene/sites/networking factors that are out there. It seems like such a large prospect to wade through. There are all kinds of sites out there to do with it. I would like to look into something that I could manage in my spare time, that will earn me a decent amount of money and will give me a nice portfolio that I can share. Blog writing, article writing (which I have been trying my hand out at), eBooks (like the seizure one...how cool would that be in an eBook??) things that are small enough and easy enough to start with.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Any companies that you have had experience with? What is the pay like for someone like me? Is it even worth doing or looking into? I am so curious about this line of work. As I said before, the writing bug has taken me captive!! Who knows what this year will bring? Maybe I will be published one day??

Anyhow, Merry Christmas to everyone, Happy Holidays to all and Happy New Year to come!!